Convention Center - How Insane Is This?

[cswitwer]

(This is from yesterday evening)

Relayed from the New Orleans war zone:

"Although obviously he has no exact count, he estimates more than 10,000 people are packed into and around and outside the convention center still waiting for the buses. They had no food, no water, and no medicine for the last three days, until today, when the National Guard drove over the bridge above them, and tossed out supplies over the side crashing down to the ground below. Much of the supplies were destroyed from the drop. Many people tried to catch the supplies to protect them before they hit the ground. Some offered to walk all the way around up the bridge and bring the supplies down, but any attempt to approach the police or national guard resulted in weapons being aimed at them.

There are many infants and elderly people among them, as well as many people who were injured jumping out of windows to escape flood water and the like -- all of them in dire straights.

Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint. Hour after hour they watch buses pass by filled with people from other areas. Tensions are very high, and there has been at least one murder and several fights. 8 or 9 dead people have been stored in a freezer in the area, and 2 of these dead people are kids.

The people are so desperate that they're doing anything they can think of to impress the authorities enough to bring some buses. These things include standing in single file lines with the eldery in front, women and children next; sweeping up the area and cleaning the windows and anything else that would show the people are not barbarians."

[Josephine96]

My question is.. How come the Convention Center has not been bussed out like the Superdome..? I don't understand that..

Glad the troops are there, Glad the hungry may be getting food and water. But GET THESE PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR HORRIFIC CONDITIONS!

[JQ Public]

These people are not Iraqi's they are Americans. GEEZ! Please treat them like AMERICANS!!!!!!!!!!!!! Put your guns down! Can't they get out of their humvees and trucks and put up some tables or smthg outside the center?

[cswitwer]

The saddest part to me is that these people were starving and dehydrated, having to squat where they stood to relieve themselves, shoving dead bodies out of the way when people died.

And now they are so desperate that these poor, horribly suffering people are cleaning the windows to try to impress the authorities enough to get help????

What the h*ll is going on down there?

[soonertwister]

JQ Public, the Civic Center site was completely emptied today well before nightfall. There are no persons needing evacuation from there anymore.

[JQ Public]

According to this article the Convention Center will still have people outside it for another night.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/03/katrin ... index.html

But i do know the Superdome has been emptied of its victims.

[JQ Public]

Convention Center Evacuation Begins


Saturday September 3, 2005 4:46 PM

AP Photo LAEG106

By ROBERT TANNER

AP National Writer

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - A fleet of air-conditioned buses rolled up to the city's devastated convention center Saturday to begin evacuating an estimated 25,000 people who have been waiting for days amid the stench of garbage and rotting corpses.

Thousands of people began pushing and dragging their belongings up the street to more than a dozen buses, the mood more numb than jubilant.

Yolanda Sanders stood at a barricade clutching her cocker spaniel, Toto. She had been at the convention center for five days.

``I had faith that they'd come. I feel good that I know I can get to my family,'' she said. Sanders didn't know yet where they were taking her, but ``anyplace is better than here. People are dying over there.''

Thousands from the Superdome were taken to Texas on air-conditioned buses, but early Saturday the operation was halted - with as many as 5,000 in the stadium still to be evacuated five days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall.

Lt. Kevin Cowan of the state Office of Emergency Preparedness said the evacuations were stopped so authorities could focus on getting people out of the convention center. Jennifer Washington was among the frustrated evacuees who waited for buses to come.

``At first they said 6:30 this morning, then they said 9,'' said Washington, 25, who has not been able to find her four children in the aftermath of the storm. Buses arrived later in the morning.

Helicopters were taking the sickest people from the center, and two of the city's most troubled hospitals were evacuated Friday after desperate doctors spent days making tough choices about which patients got dwindling supplies of food, water and medicines.

``We're just trying to ease their pain, give them a little bit of dignity and get them out of here,'' said Lt. Col. Connie McNabb.

A Saks Fifth Avenue store billowed smoke Saturday, as did rows of warehouses on the east bank of the Mississippi River, where corrugated roofs buckled and tiny explosions erupted. Gunfire - almost two dozen shots - broke out in the French Quarter overnight.

As the warehouse district burned, Ron Seitzer, 61, washed his dirty laundry in the even dirtier waters of the Mississippi River and said he didn't know how much longer he could stay without water or power, surrounded by looters.

``I've never even had a nightmare or a beautiful dream about this,'' he said as he watched the warehouses burn. ``People are just not themselves.''

On Friday, President Bush took an aerial tour of the city and answered complaints about a sluggish government response by saying, ``We're going to make it right.'' Flatbed trucks carried huge crates, pallets and bags of relief supplies, including Meals Ready to Eat. Soldiers sat in the backs of open-top trucks, their rifles pointing skyward.

In what looked like a scene from a Third World country, some outside the convention center threw their arms heavenward and others hollered profanities as camouflage-green vehicles and supply trucks finally rolled through axle-deep floodwaters into what remained of New Orleans.

National Guard Lt. Col. Jerry Crooks said troops had served more than 70,000 meals outside the convention center and had 130,000 more on hand. Watching the caravan, Leschia Radford sang the praises of a higher power.

``Lord, I thank you for getting us out of here!'' Radford shrieked.

But on Saturday, hope was overtaken by frustration as people continued to wait. A dead man lay on sidewalk under a blanket with a stream of blood running down the pavement toward the gutter. People said he died from violence.

``We're hurting out here, man. We got to get help. All we want is someone to feel our pain, that's all,'' said Tasheka Johnson, 24.

About a dozen people who headed down the street to look for food and water said they were turned back by a soldier who pulled a gun.

``We had to get something to eat. What are they doing pulling a gun?'' said Richard Johnson, 28.

The soldiers' arrival-in-force came amid angry complaints from local officials that the federal government had bungled the relief effort and let people die in the streets for lack of food, water or medicine as the city was overtaken by looting, rape and arson.

``The people of our city are holding on by a thread,'' Mayor Ray Nagin warned in a statement to CNN. ``Time has run out. Can we survive another night? And who can we depend on? Only God knows.''

The president took a land and air tour of hard-hit areas of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama Friday, and admitted of the relief effort: ``The results are not enough.'' Congress passed a $10.5 billion disaster aid package, and Bush quickly signed the measure.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco said the military presence helped calm a jittery city.

``We are seeing a show of force. It's putting confidence back in our hearts and in the minds of our people,'' Blanco said. ``We're going to make it through.''

Guard members carrying rifles also arrived at the Louisiana Superdome, where bedraggled people - many of them trapped there since the weekend - stretched around the perimeter of the building. Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, commander of the National Guard, said 7,000 Guard members would be in the city by Saturday.

All the victims in the Superdome were supposed to have been evacuated by dawn Saturday, but shortly after midnight, the buses stopped rolling. Between 2,000 and 5,000 people still in the stadium could be there until Sunday, according to the Texas Air National Guard.

Within minutes of the soldiers' arrival at the convention center, they set up six food and water lines. The crowd was for the most part orderly and grateful.

Diane Sylvester, 49, was the first person through the line. ``Something is better than nothing,'' she said of her two bottles of water and pork rib meal. ``I feel great to see the military here. I know I'm saved.''

With Houston's Astrodome already full with 15,000 storm refugees, that city opened two more centers to accommodate an additional 10,000. Dallas and San Antonio also had agreed to take refugees.

One group of Katrina's victims lurched from one tragedy to another: A bus carrying evacuees from the Superdome overturned on a Louisiana highway, killing at least one person and injuring many others.

At the broken levee along Lake Pontchartrain that swamped nearly 80 percent of New Orleans, helicopters dropped 3,000-pound sandbags into the breach and pilings were being pounded into place to seal off the waters. Engineers also were developing a plan to create new breaches in the levees so that a combination of gravity and pumping and would drain the water out of the city, a process that could take weeks.

---

Associated Press reporters Kevin McGill, Allen G. Breed, Brett Martel and Mary Foster contributed to this report.

[soonertwister]

I saw a live report from the Civic Center well over an hour ago, and the description was that the place was filled with desperate people "earlier today".

And believe me, the Civic Center was an unholy mess, but not one soul was there.

Ther reporter was the same hysterical Geraldo Rivera that was surrounded by masses yesterday. In fact, he's on TV right now. They are cleaning up the Civic Center area. No people other than military cleanup.

Get current.

[cswitwer]

Did you read at the beginning of the post where it said "This is from yesterday evening"? (As in, the day before yesterday now.)

It doesn't matter if everyone was finally emptied out of the place yesterday, the horrible way they were treated by the people that were supposed to be helping them doesn't sting any less.

[artist]

no it doesn't - why the city didn't follow the states evacuation plans is beyond me. So much of this could have been avoided. And to think they had participated in exercises just to know what to do before this...

[oneness]

Same reasons battles don't go to plans and exercises, every situation and every storm is different and there is no script, and good information becomes distorted or unclear, if it is available at all.